LOKI

The Norse god of lies gets well and truly served for his misdeeds—stuck in Midgard (Earth) as an 11-year-old boy with one month to mend his ways.

Sternly forbidden by Odin to use his godly powers and compelled to record his experiences in a diary that automatically flags every fib, Loki, or Liam Smith, endures massive frustration as every attempt to raise his rapidly falling Loki Virtue Score with good deeds falls afoul of both his ingrained trickster instincts and his general cluelessness about humans and their feelings. (It doesn’t help that Thor, “god of bum thunder,” comes along disguised as his rude brother.) Readers will have no trouble seeing where, time after time, he goes wrong…or spotting the literally faint signs of a voice of conscience that begin to appear on occasional pages even before he climactically hires himself out to a bully for a humiliating trick on Valerie, the one classmate he’s managed not to alienate. Along with flavorsome Norse mythological references, Stowell peppers her whiny protagonist’s daily entries with spiky pen-and-ink drawings of mostly White divines and humans, hand-lettered outbursts, and isolated cartoon panels with smart comments in balloons. At last, after Loki helps rescue Valerie from a quartet of frost giants and, more importantly, shows sincere remorse for doing her wrong, the one-eyed Allfather grants his request to stick around Midgard for future adventures in friendship and snack-food discoveries.

Salutary reading for anyone who needs steering toward good behavior…or good-ish anyway.